Labor Day Scholarship Pick: "Labor and Racial Solidarity"

In their draft "So Closely Intertwined: Labor and Racial Solidarity," available on ssrn, Professors Nancy Leong (Denver) and Charlotte Garden (Seattle) seek to bring alive the words of Martin Luther King from which their title is derived:  "As I have said many times, and believe with all my heart, the coalition that can have the greatest impact in the struggle for human dignity here in America is that of the blacks and forces of labor, because their fortunes are so closely intertwined.”

ConLawProfs Leong and Garden deploy a variety of theories and doctrines, anchoring their article in "an interdisciplinary literature that includes insights from legal, economic, psychological and sociological scholarly research."  They view their narrative as a counter-narrative to the conventional wisdom that the relationship between unions and people of color is one of rivalry.  Their first section takes on four pieces of conventional wisdom: 

• Interests of White and Non-White Workers Are Fundamentally Opposed
• Unions Benefit Only White Workers
• Unions Lack Racial Empathy
• Unions Don’t Care About Communities of Color

These myths are worth debunking, although Leong and Garden also discuss their genesis in scholarship and doctrine. One of the joys of the paper as a piece of co-authored scholarship is the authors' frank portrayal of their own attempts at understanding and their disagreements.  In considering the difficulty in discerning how to interpret the "Black History Month event" organized by the SEIU, Service Employees International Union, the professors agree that there was "overt exoticism," but differed as to how broadly problematic the entire event should be judged.

The constitutional theory is mostly implicit, but this is an important piece bridging racial equality and employment equality for this Labor Day.

RR
[image: Martin Luther King, 1964, via]